“Namen?” he asked, pulling out a little black book.
“Private Anderson, Tucker,” I said, and recited my serial number. He jotted it down, then put his book away.
“You are prisoner,” he said in heavily accented English. “Come now.”
Turning, he led the way to a dirt road, where a dusty old truck waited. At his gesture, two of his men lowered the clapboard. I climbed in past two alert looking guards.
“No talk,” said the captain who’d found me. Then his boots crunched on the ground and he was gone.
I leaned forward, straining to see my fellow prisoners. Had the Germans caught Lou? As best I could tell in the darkness, about half a dozen sullen men sat there with me. One of them moaned a little. I could smell blood and urine.
“Hello?” I whispered. “Lou?”
“Shh,” the man next to me said softly in my ear. “The guards will give you a thrashing if they hear.” He had a British accent. “We’re all R.A.F.,” he added. “No other yanks here, old boy.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“Smithers,” he said softly, and we shook hands.
“Tuck,” I told him.
He nodded and that was the end of it. I sank back a little.
Lou wasn’t here. He might have gotten away.
It was a small comfort.
* * * *
It was dawn when the truck started. By the thin gray morning light, I could see my five fellow prisoners clearly for the first time. They looked as bleary-eyed and miserable as I felt. Smithers was a corporal, I saw. Nobody said anything; we just rode in a sullen, helpless silence under the watchful eyes of our two guards.
After an hour or so, we came to a stop. Through the back of the truck I could see what looked like a small rail yard. Dense forest came down near the tracks about a hundred yards away. The guards lowered the clapboard and motioned us out. Stretching stiff muscles, we complied.
Several boxcars were parked on the tracks waiting for an engine, I saw. The guards lined us up while they opened one, then loaded us into it like cattle. Dirty straw lined the floor, I saw when I stepped in. It smelled faintly of mold.
“What about a doctor?” Smithers called to the captain outside. “Can you get us a doctor? One of our chaps has a broken arm! You there—”
The guards rolled the boxcar’s door shut with a firm thump and I heard a bar being lowered into place. Luckily it wasn’t dark inside. Blades of light slanted between the thick wooden slats of the walls.
“Hey!” Smithers yelled.
I heard boots walking away. We were alone.
“Bastards,” Smithers swore. He kicked the door for a little while, but it did no good.
Everyone else was settling down on the straw. I hadn’t realized how drained I was; when I lay down, I fell asleep almost at once, but not easily and not deeply.
* * * *
Twice that day the guards opened the door, once to serve a kind of lunch—a thin greasy stew and stale bread—and once to replace the latrine bucket in the corner. Each time Smithers tried to talk to the Germans about Carter, the man with the broken arm, but they either didn’t understand or weren’t interested in anything but their immediate task.
There didn’t seem to be much else we could do but make the poor devil comfortable. Carter seemed in a kind of fever dream, talking or moaning every now and again, sometimes thrashing about, and I thought that sleep was probably the best thing for him. He wouldn’t be aware of his pain. We took turns sitting beside him, talking soothingly if he moaned, trying to make him as comfortable as we could. He seemed to be growing steadily worse despite everything we did.
“He’ll be dead by morning,” I heard one of the men mutter.
Smithers shot him an angry look. “None of that,” he said. “He’s a strong lad, our Carter. He’ll pull through.”
That evening the Germans served the same sort of greasy stew again, and after we finished, they brought in another three British prisoners. I wondered if that was a good or a bad sign for my friend Lou.
Darkness fell, and I began to feel sleepy even though I’d spent most of the day half drowsing out on the straw. I stretched out and began to drift off.
Suddenly Carter thrashed like a crazed mule. His boot struck me in the arm, and cursing, I sat up and pinned his legs to protect myself.
“Easy there,” I murmured. “Easy.” At last he lay still, panting. I arranged the straw under his head, then looked at the others.
None of them had moved a muscle to help. I shook my head. Carter was one of theirs. They should be the ones looking after him, I thought, not me. A few seconds later Carter lay quietly again. Everyone else was snoring softly. Rising, I moved to the other end of the boxcar. He wouldn’t wake me up again tonight, I thought. If he cried out, one of his mates could see to him.
Then I heard the bar on the door lift, and rollers squealed as the door moved aside. A dark shape stood silhouetted in the opening. It moved forward, snuffling the air like a pig. At once it drifted to the injured man, hunched over him, and a soft lapping sound began.
I had to be dreaming, I thought. I rubbed my eyes, but the door still gaped and the creature still crouched over Carter. Everyone else still seemed to be asleep. I touched my sore arm. I would have been asleep, too, I thought, if Carter hadn’t kicked me.
Moving as softly as I could, taking great care not to rustle the straw, I crept up on the stranger. At the time I thought he must have heard me, but now I know he sensed my aliveness behind him. As I was about to jump forward, he suddenly rose and whirled, and I gazed into a face from a madman’s nightmare.
He had eyes that glowed like a cat’s, only red, and fangs like a snake’s. Blood covered his face and hands. As I watched, a long thin white tongue licked it from his lips and chin.
Slowly he smiled. It was the most terrifying expression I had ever seen, and it sent a cold jolt through me, worse than anything I could ever have imagined. I felt my bladder let go. An icy sweat began to pour from my skin. I trembled. I shook all over. No matter how I tried, I could not look away from those horrible red eyes.
“Zo,” it whispered, for I realized that it was not a man. “Was makst du hier, Mann?” It drifted forward like a cloud of smoke, enveloping me, and I blinked and found myself on my back. A numbness came over me. I heard the lapping sound again, but closer, at my throat. My mind drifted like a leaf in a stream.
Air raid sirens suddenly blew outside. I blinked and sat up, suddenly alone. My neck ached. My hands felt icy. My legs shook like gelatin.
With effort, I turned to look for the creature, but it seemed to have vanished. The boxcar’s door still stood open. I crawled to it, then half fell out onto the train tracks. I huddled there for a moment, afraid I’d been seen or heard. Across from the boxcar I saw running men, and one by one windows in the station went dark. The air raid siren blared. Far overhead, I heard the throaty rumble of bombers.
Somehow, I climbed to my feet and stumbled off toward the forest. My only thought was of escape from the creature. If a German guard had found me, I think I would have embraced him with joy.
I must have been dazed by the attack, driven half crazy from fear and pain and bloodloss. As I think back over the months that followed, only fractured images come to mind: stalking small animals in the dark, ripping open their throats, drinking their blood to warm my cold insides. Hiding in a fox burrow against the painful brightness of day. Sobbing uncontrollably at the sight of towns, of distant men and women, of the kind of warm happy life I felt I had lost forever.
Whatever that creature was, whatever it had done to me, I realized that I, too, was no longer a man. I hunted and lived as an animal. And, like an animal, I began to rely on my senses—senses which now seemed inexplicably altered. As I moved silently through the forest, I could somehow feel every warm living body around me…could paralyze small animals with the force of my gaze…could hunt as the fiercest predators must have done in the dawn of history.
&nbs
p; The first true memory I have is of taking a human life: a boy who wandered too far into the woods one night fell prey to my fangs. After I drank his life away, I recoiled in horror at what I had done, and it was as though I awakened for the first time since the Germans had captured me. I had murdered a boy. It was truly the worst moment of my life.
I buried him deep in my fox burrow and fled deep into the woods. That afternoon I sensed hundreds of men searching for they boy, felt their pain of loss, their hurt and despair. I longed to go to them, to tell them what I had done, to take my punishment like a man, but I could not summon the strength. They never found either of us.
After that I vowed not to give in to my base instincts. I would not be a wild creature unfit for human company. And so, very slowly, very painfully, with the death of that boy, I did gain a measure of control over myself.
It was as though I had emerged from a dream, or perhaps from an infancy of sorts. I came aware of myself and saw what I had become: a dirty, naked, monstrous beast sucking the life from the living. I could not continue this way.
Over the next few months I took greater care. After satisfying my hungers with the blood of beasts, I crept out of the forest and moved among the dwellings of men. Now that I tried, I discovered I could render whole households unconscious with the sheer force of my will. As they slept, I crept among them and took whatever I needed: soap, a razor, clean clothes, and their brightly colored paper money. The war must be over, I realized as I studied them in their beds. They had the soft, well-fed look of peace all about them.
When I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror, I knew the truth. I had not wanted to admit it, but inside I had already guessed what I had become: a vampire. Not one like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in the movies, cringing at crosses and holy water, but a man transformed into a blood-driven animal, with all of a man’s weaknesses and an animal’s strengths. I could not turn myself into an animal; I was an animal—a nocturnal, blood-drinking animal with powers over the minds and bodies of others—so much for legends, I thought. Crosses, garlic, and running water wouldn’t stop me. I suspected bullets might.
Of course there were moments of self-pity, times when I wondered why I had been spared death to continue this monstrous half life. Why me? I silently cried. Why couldn’t I have died in that boxcar so long ago? I had no answer.
I had avoided the sun, but the next day I went out in it. As I suspected, I found it uncomfortable and far too bright, but my flesh did not burn. With dark glasses and a hat, I could move in the daytime if I chose.
I stole glasses and a hat that evening.
Cleaned up, shaved, with hair combed and cut as best I could manage, I followed the road to the Dresden. I ate frequently, trying to curb my instincts to hunt and kill, and found raw or very rare meat could sustain me, though it never truly satisfied my vast appetite. I had by this time learned some German, and posing as an American tourist, I managed to make my way to West Berlin.
My journey back to America was long and convoluted. By the time I reached New York City by steamship, nearly five years had passed.
I still hungered, but now I chose my victims carefully. They were criminals and cutthroats, murderers and racketeers, the scum of society. I stole everything I wanted from them. When the thirst became too great, I drank their blood—always careful to make it seem as though they had been murdered by rivals gangsters. Once, staging the scene of a grisly murder, I paused to wonder how many other such notorious crimes had actually been arranged by my kind. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? The blood was a giveaway. The Donner Party? Possibly. The Mary Celeste? Rather likely. Any of a hundred more could have been—and probably were—the result of vampire attacks.
And vampire I proclaimed myself. There could be no other answer for my condition. Much as legend, books, and films portrayed us as cold, unfeeling creatures of the grave, the reverse was true. I felt; I needed and yearned and dreamed and hoped and prayed. And I craved companionship. The followers and acolytes I occasionally gathered to myself never proved satisfying. They wanted to be like me, to become vampires themselves, but I had no idea how I had become one myself. Biting them didn’t seem to do the trick; they remained the same frail, weak creatures they’d always been, and eventually I tired of them and abandoned their kind forever.
In 1960, when I called my parents for the first time since my return from the war, my mother answered the telephone. I was so nervous my hands shook.
“Hello?” she said when nobody answered. “Hello?”
“Mother,” I said, “this is Tuck.”
There was silence. Then, “If this is your idea of a joke, you’re sick.” And she hung up.
I called back. The telephone rang, but nobody picked up.
I sat up alone all that night. And the following night I fed on anyone and anything that moved for the first time since Germany. The police blamed a satanic cult. I could have laughed.
* * * *
I never tried to contact my parents again while they were alive, though I dutifully took out a subscription to the weekly Plainfield Gazette and began scanning the obituary page. My mother died in 1979, and I came out to see her funeral, standing at the back of her casket lowered into the ground. Mother had always been active in the church. Nearly a hundred people turned out to pay their last respects. It rained; nobody paid any attention to a lone stranger in black who didn’t speak and didn’t attend the reception afterwards.
And now my father…
I had no claim on the family house and lands. Officially I was “lost and presumed dead.” I looked perhaps thirty or thirty-five today; nobody would believe me if I came forward and claimed to be sixty-year-old Tucker Anderson, heir to the estate. The farm would probably go to one of our Oakhill relatives.
As I wandered through the house, I realized I wouldn’t miss it. Earlier that night, I’d put the executor of my parents’ estate to sleep and taken his keys. Alone, I’d driven out, looking for something—though what, I couldn’t quite say.
Dishes were stacked two feet high in the kitchen sink, and the cheap formica table had disappeared beneath yellowing newspapers, a scattering of old tools, and the dried-out remains of a dozen TV dinners. I could see where rats or mice had been gnawing at the food and papers.
My parents’ bedroom was dirty and unkempt; the bedclothes hadn’t been washed in months, probably. There was a sickly sweet smell like infection in the air, so I opened the windows to try and get rid of it.
Then I climbed up the narrow stairs to what had once been the attic, to where my room had been. It felt like I was approaching a gallows.
When I pushed the door open, though, I found my room hadn’t changed since I’d left. Clearly nobody had been up here since my mother died, and dust lay like a blanket over everything.
I stood before my bureau, studying the blocky wooden figures I’d carved as a boy. They were crude, not good at all, but they’d occupied my evening hours while listening to The Shadow and Jack Benny on the radio. An old Cardinals baseball card was stuck to the mirror. Gary Lewitt, the name said, but I didn’t remember him. Perhaps he was some forgotten hero.
I poked through the bureau drawers, wincing a bit at how worn all my clothes had been. I’d been a ragged kid, pure hick trash. I moved to the closet. The clothes there weren’t much better. Most should have been thrown out long before I stopped wearing them.
As I was just about to leave, my gaze fell on a small shoebox peeking out from under a towel on the closet floor. I’d kept my childhood treasures there, I recalled with a sad little smile. How pathetic they must seem now.
Nevertheless, I picked up the box, crossed to the bed, and spilled out the contents. Half remembering, I pawed through Indian arrowheads, bits of string, colored stones, a few Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, chipped marbles, and half a dozen clippings from old magazines. One article from Farmer’s World caught my eye, and when I unfolded it, I discovered an ad for a Regulato 155 tractor. The paper’s edges felt feathery f
rom being handled too much, and the crease where I’d folded and refolded it had almost cut it in half. I’d loved that tractor as a kid. I’d dreamed of buying Father one for his birthday.
Finally I sighed, scooped my treasures back into their box, added the carvings from my bureau, and only paused to look one last time out the single small, high window. As a kid, I’d always had to stand on a chair to see out. Now it was eye level.
You can come full circle, but you can’t go home, I thought sadly. My mother had made that clear the one time I’d called. It was best to let the old ghosts go, to move on and make the best of your life. That was what I’d come here to do, after all, wasn’t it?
* * * *
I ended up staying the night. There were clean sheets in the closet, and I changed my old bed and slept in my old room. Everything and nothing had changed.
If there are such a thing as ghosts, perhaps they touched me then. When I awakened, the sun streaming in that small window and touching my face, for a second it was 1944 again and I was a kid. I could almost smell bacon frying downstairs, almost hear Father’s old tractor puttering away in the yard, almost hear the soft lowing of our cows in the south pasture.
I rose, dressed slowly, and went downstairs to shave and freshen up. In the bathroom, in a little cup on a shelf, sat my father’s false teeth. I smiled. He should have seen my teeth, I thought.
As I stared at his, though, it came to me that there was something odd about them, about the way they were cut. The eye teeth seemed too long…longer certainly than I remembered, but Father had never been one to smile.
I picked up his teeth and, smiling to show off my fangs, compared both of ours in the mirror. They were identical.
But that’s not possible, I thought. How—how could he—
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